CDF : Searchability of Data

Related products: Search and Data Exploration

CDF needs some serious help in searching and querying data.

 

I asked about some simple reporting, like a query telling me how many pumps are in Acid South.  To do this within CDF requires a pretty exhaustive knowledge of our metadata fields and what they mean.  In this case, understanding that pumps would be found in the SAP data source, and that equipment class was held within the Catalog Profile metadata field, then having to know what numerical code from SAP for Cat Profile actually corresponded to pumps.  It’s easier to do in SAP.

 

Even once the list was created in CDF, there is no way to export it.  You can look at it within CDF, but that’s it.  For something like a bad actor report, Crystal indicated that our current options were to have a Celanese person proficient in python to write one or hire Cognite to write one.

 

All this is to say that from a usability perspective, CDF is, at the current point in time, probably only good for looking up individual pieces of information, one at a time.  The effective reporting capability is basically zero.  I can’t say I was expecting anything more than that, but I was a little surprised that their answer to everything was to go code whatever you wanted yourself in Python.

 

In my head, I was envisioning something like Pivot Table level usability with the CDF data.

NewGathering Interest

Hi Ibrahim,

 

Thank you for your feedback.

On the short term we are improving our current searchability with metadata fields, so soon it should be easier to slice and dice the data based on metadata fields. Though this will not entirely improve the experience and we want to make it very easy and support the example you have provided. Our better solution is going to be the new way of modelling data with flexible data modelling, which will remove the hurdles with using metadata. 
In the meantime another way of slicing and dicing the data, to have a more reporting capability we offer through the CDF connector when using PBI and Grafana. But from what I know you use Tableau, and atm we don’t have a connector for Tableau.

We'd love to better understand what metadata fields you and other community members usually need and use. Then, when we have more progress on the metadata search improvements, we'll share the new capabilities.

Thank you,
Andreea.